Canterbury Earthquake

Appeals and donations

Jodi Mitchell
24 February 2011

I will be honest, I have no words to describe the way I feel about what has happened in Christchurch, I cannot fathom what it is like to be living there at the moment.  Devastating seems like such an understatement.

When the earthquake hit, I was sitting in a meeting in an office building in Wellington.  The building rocked and rolled a bit, but not enough for me to stress about it or get up out of my seat.  I had assumed another typical Wellington earthquake – so deep or so far away that there was no major impact.  I walked out of that meeting just as the news was hitting that it had been centered in Christchurch – it seemed unbelievable that an earthquake felt relatively strongly in Wellington actually happened all the way down there.  My heart completely sank, despite still not knowing what had really happened there.  The news was quickly delivered that buildings and houses were ‘down’.  I immediately text people I work with down there – like everyone else I just needed to know that the people I knew were safe.

In my case they were, others have not been so lucky. 

I couldn’t watch the news that afternoon – the short part I did watch had me in tears.  That night, I sat, glued to the TV, crying, wishing I could do more.  I think over half the country was in the same position, doing the same thing.

We all want to help.

A plea has been made by Emergency Management Southland to please donate money rather than goods.  They unfortunately don’t have anyway to store these sorts of goods, if you sit back and consider the management of the logistics of second hand goods coming in from every direction and then getting them out to people that need them it would be phenomenal.

Below is a list of legitimate ways to donate and help those in Christchurch.  Rumours of scams, those making money from the tragedies are already circulating – please be sure of where and to whom you donate to.

Red Cross
The Red Cross have an appeal set up – unfortunately their site is overloading due to high traffic volumes, please bear with them and wait and try a little later if you can’t get through straight away.

BNZ
BNZ have set up an earthquake appeal account and are also offering an earthquake assistance package for those affected.

Other Banks
ASB, ANZ, National Bank and Kiwibank all have appeal funds set up.  You can donate via online and telephone banking, or in person at any branch.  Most have international swift codes set up to accept donations from overseas also.

Supermarkets
A number of supermarkets are collecting new, unused goods, such as canned foods and nappies – Kapiti Pak’n’Save is an example. 

Mary’s Markets, Wellington
We will be collecting donations at Mary’s Market this weekend at the Overseas Terminal (Saturday 9am-1pm) in Wellington.  We will deposit this money into the BNZ appeal account and post a copy of the receipt on this site.

If you know of any others, please feel free to email [email protected] so that we can add them to the list.

Please excuse the lack of photos on this article – when I started to look at them I just couldn’t bring myself to put up photos of other peoples despair and tragedy.